Alice Walker Influences

People's creative works are many times inspired by their own life experiences. Whether it be from their childhood or their late years of adulthood, the connections between people and their creations are often prominent. In Alice Walker’s novels and poems her hardships and social ideals built up a collection of works that embodied her life. Walker’s parents were both sharecroppers and she faced many obstacles just to get a higher education and become a successful woman. From her part in the civil rights movement to her fight to empower women and find gender equality, Walker’s works have been met with criticisms however are a clear story of her life. Many of Alice Walker’s works were influenced by her mother’s powerful role in her life and
Walker was brought up by two sharecroppers in the deep south where she experienced “double vision” (Baughman 2) on the discrimination occurring around her. This vision was further explained in her work Our Mother’s Gardens, where she expressed blacks southers were “capable of knowing, with remarkably silent accuracy, the people who make up the larger world that surrounds and suppresses his own” (2). With this the racial situation and jobs her parents held largely influenced the characters in her novels. In her novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, it followed the lives of generations of sharecroppers and made Walker a “skillful recorder of the Southern character” (Callahan 1). Despite this obvious support of African Americans in America, Walker received criticisms for her most famous piece The Color Purple, from groups as prominent as the NAACP for portraying black men in a negative light. In this piece, a young black women is horribly abused by her father and husband both of whom were African American. This made some “denounced the film for racism” (“Alice Walker” 4). However, the book was intended to be a commentary on “a history of oppression and abuse suffered at the hands of the men” (4). Perhaps Walker’s most personal story dealing with racial discrimination came at the height of the civil rights movement, where she fell in love with a white man, and became “first legally married mixed-race couple in Jackson” (2). This was followed with the novel, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart which depicted a “marriage set in the Deep South during the early years of the civil rights movement” (Baughman 5). Alice Walker’s experience as an African American living in America influenced her works in major ways however, her experiences as a woman had a larger